How Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's Life Was Forever Changed By World War Two

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How many people in the United States actually know what happened to the Japanese Americans during World War II? Do most of us in this country honestly know the cruel, unfair hardships they were put through? On December 7th 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. This was the reason America supposedly could not trust those from Japan who immigrated here. Because of this distrust, our government put them into internment camps. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston was one of these people put into an internment camp, a point in her history that changed her life forever. Jeanne's immediate family before the war consisted of twelve members. She had a mother, father, and nine older siblings, as well as her mother's mother who lived with them. The rest of the family on her father’s side lived in Japan. However, the relatives on her mother’s side lived in a different part of the U.S. Her father’s family is from a long line of samurais, which are just below the ranking level of nobility and above farmers. Farmers, in turn, are higher on the ranking scale than merchants in old Japan. Around the 1800’s the country began to no longer need the samurai, yet her father’s family still owned a vast amount of land and were very rich. Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Jeanne’s father worked as a fisherman, her mother at a cannery. They lived in Ocean Park, which is near Santa Monica in California. Soon after Pearl Harbor was bombed, the government made the decision to place Japanese-Americans in internment camps. When Jeanne and her family were shipped to Manzanar, they all remained together, except her father who was taken for questioning. After a year he was reunited with them at the camp. On the first night that they had arrived at there, the cam... ... middle of paper ... ...itizens would know the truth about what happened to the Japanese in America. Jeanne told people in an interview, that in her book “It tells a story about America. For the first time in the history of our country, all three branches of the government violated the constitution. They rounded up a group of people because of their race and because of the potential to be dangerous. They rounded them up and imprisoned them in these camps from one to three years, and no one knew about it. This was a great violation of democratic values of this country.’’ Works Cited Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D. Houston. Farewell to Manzanar New York: bantam book, 1973. Print “Full Interview with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.’’ Cal Humanities: A State of Open Mind.2014. web. Feb.19th, 2014. Internet “Farewell to Manzanar.” Precedan. Com. 2014. Web. Feb. 19,2014. internet

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